The third aspect is the sheer modernity of Speer. How his technocracy and managerialism connects him directly to our current world. When we read his words, and listen to him speaking, we seem to hear a contemporary business executive. It is entirely plausible that he might have said:
‘Had I been born twenty years later I would be a highly respected man today. Maybe the head of Daimler-Benz, chairman of the board of Hoechst, chief executive of Deutsche Bank.’fn7
In all the thousands of pages I’ve read about this man, coming across Gitta Sereny’s book Albert Speer: His Battle with Truth marked a watershed for me. Moments of real epiphany are rare, but I can still remember where I was – in Suffolk, sitting by the fire, the night before Christmas Eve 1996, everyone else in the family had gone to bed – when I came across one particular passage in this book. It was on page 184, towards the bottom. Speer is speaking about Hitler’s ‘fetish for secrecy’ and the way that nobody should seek to know more than was required ‘for the enactment of his or her duties’. And then he says this – two sentences which instantly opened up new thoughts:
Hitler required us not only to compartmentalise our activities but also our thinking [my emphasis] … He insisted that each man should only think about his task and not be concerned with that of his neighbour.
Could compartmentalisation be the key? This was the psychological aspect that underlay so many of the events that had most disturbed me – and still disturb me today – the Saurer memorandum, the people working in the Shell Centre the day after the executions in Nigeria, in fact anybody working for a transnational corporation who cannot see those affected by their work. So to find Speer talking about this process as being central to how he and many others in Nazi Germany operated was fascinating. He explains that such compartmentalisation was formalised by General Order No. 1 (Grundsätzlicher Befehl Nr. 1) on 11 January 1940, forbidding the ‘thoughtless passing on of decrees, orders of information specified as secret’, and that this order was posted up on the wall of every office and building: ‘Every man need only know what is going on in his own domain …’ Subsequently, I came across this passage in Inside the Third Reich, in which Speer goes into greater detail about this psychological process:
Worse still was the restriction of responsibility to one’s own field. That was explicitly demanded. Everyone kept to his own group – of architects, physicians, jurists, technicians, soldiers or farmers. The professional organisations to which everyone had to belong were called chambers (Physicians Chamber, Art Chamber), and this term aptly described the way people were immured in isolated, closed-off areas of life. The longer Hitler’s system lasted, the more people’s minds moved within such isolated chambers.
However, in addition to this externally imposed kind of compartmentalisation, Speer goes on to describe something even more pernicious – his own, voluntary, isolating of himself; his own psychological collusion in this way of thinking and operating. He gives the following view of himself – which is both revealing and quite bizarre considering his role as the chief architect of the Third Reich and designer of the infamous Nuremberg rallies. Speer says that, up until the end of the war, he’d always considered himself to be essentially apolitical:
I felt myself to be Hitler’s architect. Political events did not concern me … I felt there was no need for me to take any political positions at all … I was expected to confine myself to the job of building. The grotesque extent to which I clung to this illusion is indicated by a memorandum of mine to Hitler as late as 1944; ‘The task I have to fulfil is an unpolitical one. I have felt at ease in my work only so long as my person and my work were evaluated solely by the standard of practical accomplishments.’ But fundamentally the distinction was inconsequential. Today it seems to me that I was trying to compartmentalise my mind [my emphasis].
It seems clear that there is a strong continuity in the process that Speer is describing here, and the activities of numerous organisations today, numerous corporations. The specialisation that’s demanded in so many fields, the way that this increases the potential problems of people only discussing issues within a ‘bubble’ of known and understood, coded, internal languages. And the consequent danger of decisions then being made that are based on ‘groupthink’ rather than rigorously interrogated ideas. Wasn’t this precisely the kind of decision-making that led to the banks’ absurd speculative schemes which in turn triggered the economic crisis of 2007–8? This, together with the single-minded focus on the task that needs to be done, the ruthlessness involved here – the way this brings with it a deliberate blindness to anything outside the fulfilment of the task.
But there is something else in Speer’s behaviour, and his later reflections, which is equally disturbing – again, precisely because of how applicable they are to today’s globalised economy. At the heart of this is Speer’s worshipping of new technology, his faith that it could overcome almost all challenges, could provide virtually all of the answers, and his awareness that, in such a technocratic world, there would inevitably be casualties. And considerations of human empathy or moral implications would have to be swept aside. In a little-known and very rarely quoted passage, which I believe to be absolutely critical to understanding not just Speer but contemporary capitalism, he says this about his working relationship with specialists in the armaments industry:
Basically, I exploited the phenomenon of the technician’s often blind devotion to his task. Because of what seems to be the moral neutrality of technology [my emphasis], these people were without any scruples about their activities. The more technical the world imposed on us by the war, the more dangerous was this indifference of the technician to the direct consequences of his anonymous activities.
Again, it’s not difficult to think of many parallels in our societies. The brilliant aeronautical engineers doing cutting-edge research into refining how unmanned planes can fly even higher – who cannot connect their work to the use of drones to kill human beings in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Or the way that talented geologists working in exploration departments of major oil companies rarely link their skilled seismic testing with the ultimate reality of the earth’s catastrophic heating up caused by carbon emissions generated by the continuing use of fossil fuels. When I hear the word ‘technology’ being used in a kind of evangelical way, apparently without reference to the human beings who are affected or without a sense of the wider moral framework, it makes me shiver. Take this example from John Browne, speaking in 2000, who was at the time CEO of BP, regarded, curiously, as a ‘progressive’ voice within the oil industry – here talking evangelically about the way technology will conquer all before it:
Historically all the fears of shortages … of food, of water, of land were disproved by change, by technical breakthroughs, which substituted one thing for another, and through fundamental shifts in productivity … Now, to an unprecedented extent, technology has the ability to repeat that process, embracing a radical and transforming change beyond all previous experience … We face a revolution in the way the economy works driven by new technology. A revolution which I believe will have major beneficial consequences for the environment.fn8